You may proceed to the site by clicking here, however some pages might not
work correctly.

LATEST VIDEOS

More Videos:

Justice in Business Is Often a Slow, Imprecise Process

Written by: Dana Blankenhorn02/06/13 - 7:30 AM EST

Tickers in this article:
BP HAL MHP RIG XOM

NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- When a kid is kidnapped or murdered, we all know where justice lies. We don't worry about how long it might take. We don't concern ourselves with whether the case has grown cold. Justice is a process, sometimes a slow one, but we're patient with it because we need it to fall on the right heads to be credible.

When Deepwater Horizon blew up, almost three years ago, we knew who did it. Despite finger-pointing at rig operator TransOcean (RIG) -- which has yet to recover its preblowout stock price despite a continuing oil boom -- or cement producer Halliburton (HAL) -- which quickly recovered its prespill share price of $35 but has since made little progress -- most of the blame has fallen on BP (BP) , as 65% owner and spokesman for the group.

As an investment, BP tracks Exxon Mobil (XOM) . Since the spill was capped, the two stocks have continued to track, but BP has not gained any of the ground it lost. Not in the markets, and not in the public imagination. The stain abides.

BP shareholders, in short, are twisting slowly in the wind nearly three years on, and because corporations aren't really people -- as Texas has yet to execute one -- that may be all the justice we get.

Instead justice may lie in money, to repair the lives and livelihoods lost, and new rules, described by WKRG TV , that the drillers will want to follow so as not to walk in BP's shoes.

The delays in the BP case pale in comparison to what came out of the 2008 market crash. A civil suit is only now being prepared against Standard & Poor's , a unit of McGraw Hill (MHP) , The Washington Post reports .

James Poulos of Forbes calls this "American bloodlust," but the case against the banks, and their enablers, is far less clear than the one against BP. And history shows that, in the case of economic collapse, justice may lie more in the collapse than in the search for culpability.

One of my early fascinations as a business reporter was Samuel Insull. Here is his Wikipedia page. Insull, once a clerk to Thomas A. Edison, built a huge Chicago-based utility conglomerate that assured manufacturers of steady input prices early in the last century. When it collapsed in the 1929 crash, he became a wanted man. When he was tried, in 1934, he was basically being blamed for the Great Depression.